Introduction
Anyone who has reached a certain level of competency at 3S knows that crouching and standing affect various aspects of a fight. You've probably noticed that you take more damage when crouching, or that some combos don't seem to work unless they're standing, and so on. So let's tabulate the differences:
1. When crouching, you take more damage. The amount varies based on rounding, but it's ~25%.
2. When crouching, you take more hit stun. I don't have a precise figure for how much more, but it's a fact.
3. When crouching, your hitbox changes, usually becoming smaller. This affects how certain combos work.
Now, let's explore the ramifications of these 3 properties of crouching, as opposed to standing.
Crouching results in increased damage taken.
This is the simplest of the 3 to talk about, because it is exactly what it seems like - if you get hit while crouching, you take extra damage. This serves to deter a number of habits, such as:
- Spamming low pokes, which have the benefit of only being blockable low; if you get parried or punished on a whiff, you feel the pain a bit more.
- Spamming down parry, for much of the same reason as spamming low pokes.
- Always blocking low; although this is generally very safe, characters with good overheads (like Dudley, Makoto, Urien) can punish one-track turtling of this sort.
There is more to it than just "x% extra damage if you get hit while crouching," though. For starters, many moves/combos will result in you being juggled or airborne at some point; as soon as you leave the ground, subsequent hits will no longer benefit from the crouching bonus. This is part of the reason why something like Ken SAIII doesn't really pack much more heat if you get hit crouching; the last half of the combo is airborne, which when combined with damage scaling brings down the damage more than you would expect.
In addition, many moves (especially supers) will force you to stand up after the first hit, including Chun-li SAII and Ken SAIII. If you watch the animation closely, you'll see the character may be crouching when the super flash goes off, but they're standing up for the majority of the super itself. In these cases as well, the crouching penalty will only apply to the first hit, and perhaps wisely so - imagine Chun-li's SAII damage going up by a flat 25% if you were crouching when you got hit initially!
Crouching results in greater hit stun.
In addition to increasing the damage taken, crouching also increases the duration you're in hit stun for, which has two main effects.
In my previous post on drumming, you may recall I said something to the effect of "nothing can bail you out if your inputs are late." Well, upon reflection this is not completely true; since crouching means you're in hit stun longer, combos that are tight on standing opponents can become considerably easier on crouching ones. Classic examples of this are:
1. cr. LK xx LP dash punch xx SAI (Makoto)
2. (close) st. MK xx SAI (Akuma)
3. cr. MP xx st. LK xx LP dash punch (Yun)
The difference between standing and crouching may only be a couple of frames of additional hit stun, but those couple of frames are often the difference between a successful combo and 1 frame too late, which leads to getting punished.
The other effect of this increased hit stun is crouching-only combos. There are some combos that rely on that extra frame or two of hit stun on crouching opponents to be doable in the first place. The 3 most common, by far, are:
1. (far) st. HK xx SAII (Chun-li)
2. b.+MK xx SAIII (Ken)
3. f.+HK xx SAIII (Dudley)
As it turns out, these are all 1 frame links, so techniques like drumming are especially crucial to landing them consistently. It's also important to be able to verify that they're crouching; sometimes it's easy, if they do something like get hit throwing out a low move, but most of the time you just have to visually verify it. All of these all deal hefty amounts of damage thanks to the crouching penalty.
Crouching affects your hitbox
I'm assuming readers of this blog are familiar with the concept of a hitbox; it more or less dictates how "hittable" your sprite is at any given time. It seems obvious that crouching makes your hitbox smaller; however, this does have the consequence of standing-only combos. It's quite self-explanatory; moves that would hit your sprite while they are standing up fail to do so when they are crouching, rendering the combo invalid.
The most notorious example, by far, occurs when Dudley attempts st. HK xx EX machinegun blow against Chun-li. Chun-li's crouching hit box in general is very frustrating, as it's one of the smallest, and causes a lot of stuff to whiff entirely.
So in conclusion, crouching impacts the game in many ways, and it's good to be cognizant of all the different possibilities it opens up, especially with respect to combos.